- Don’t procrastinate and get advice early on about your pending appraisal.
- Ask someone for help about what is on your mind. Usually this might be advice about what you are thinking of submitting.
- Look at some examples of submitted examples of appraisals.
- Breaking down big goals into small goals. Starting to enter data into GP Tools , contacting your appraiser, etc.
- Avoid unnecessary work. It is not really necessary to scan and upload large amounts of evidence, unless particularly asked for. You only need to show notes if you have not written them into the toolkit. If you are submitting more than 15 documents per year you are wasting your time and effort in this process.
- Avoid duplication of effort and avoid repeating yourself. Concentrate on being focussed.
- 4 domains of Good Medical Practice, sometimes can cause confusion. A great document for this is a GMC pdf discussing the four domains and their relevance to appraisal and revalidation. Click here to download the PDF document
- Quantifiying the amount of time you are spending on entering the data. SEAs/ QIAs shouldn’t take more than 15-20 minutes.
- CPD log captures your CPD for the year. Should contain the date, number of hours, learning points. Having 1-2 learning points for each topic is enough. There is no need to scan everything on and it shouldn’t take more than 1 to 1.5 hours to convert all your notes into CPD data.
- Using a validated and accepted toolkit such as GP Tools to help you document your data. Use the mobile apps to collect your CPD data on the go.
- For MSF 360 feedback and patient surveys, remember to start early and allow a month for collection of your data and about a week for processing and collation of the responses into a report. Both types of feedback are free with GP Tools.
For more on this topic, watch a great video by Dr. Paula Wright: